The broad scope of his writing reflected upon such topics as the mind of Sir Francis Bacon, the prehistoric origins of humanity, and the contributions of Charles Darwin.

Eiseley's reputation was established primarily through his books, including The Immense Journey (1957), Darwin's Century (1958), The Unexpected Universe (1969), The Night Country (1971), and his memoir, All the Strange Hours (1975).

Science author Orville Prescott praised him as a scientist who "can write with poetic sensibility and with a fine sense of wonder and of reverence before the mysteries of life and nature."

In praise of "The Unexpected Universe", Ray Bradbury remarked, "[Eiseley] is every writer's writer, and every human's human ... One of us, yet most uncommon ..." According to his obituary in The New York Times, the feeling and philosophical motivation of the entire body of Eiseley's work was best expressed in one of his essays, The Enchanted Glass: "The anthropologist wrote of the need for the contemplative naturalist, a man who, in a less frenzied era, had time to observe, to speculate, and to dream.

Their home was located on the outskirts of town where, as author Naomi Brill writes, it was "removed from the people and the community from which they felt set apart through poverty and family misfortune.

He would later describe the lands around Lincoln as "flat and grass-covered and smiling so serenely up at the sun that they seemed forever youthful, untouched by mind or time—a sunlit, timeless prairie over which nothing passed but antelope or wandering bird.

Eiseley enrolled in the University of Nebraska, where he wrote for the newly formed journal, Prairie Schooner, and went on archaeology digs for the school's natural history museum, Morrill Hall.

Sometimes sickly, at other times testing his strength with that curious band of roving exiles who searched the land above the rippling railroad ties, he explored his soul as he sought to touch the distant past.

Eiseley received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1937 and wrote his dissertation entitled "Three Indices of Quaternary Time and Their Bearing Upon Pre-History: a Critique", which launched his academic career.

[1] At the time of his death in 1977, he was Benjamin Franklin Professor of Anthropology and History of Science, and the curator of the Early Man section at the University of Pennsylvania Museum.

Anthropologist Pat Shipman writes, the words that flowed from his pen ... the images and insights he revealed, the genius of the man as a writer, outweigh his social disability.

He was a natural fugitive, a fox at the wood's edge (in his own metaphor) ...[7]Eiseley published works in a number of different genres including poetry, autobiography, history of science, biography, and nonfictional essays.

He also notes the influence his father's hobby as an amateur Shakespearean actor may have had on Eiseley's writing, pointing out that his essays often contain dramatic elements that are usually present in plays.

"[5] In an interview on National Public Radio (NPR), author Michael Lind said, Before the rise of a self-conscious intelligentsia, most educated people – as well as the unlettered majority – spent most of their time in the countryside or, if they lived in cities, were a few blocks away from farmland or wilderness ... At the risk of sounding countercultural, I suspect that thinkers who live in sealed, air-conditioned boxes and work by artificial light (I am one) are as unnatural as apes in cages at zoos.

"[16] In his conclusion, Eiseley quotes Darwin: "If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake of our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all melted together."

Auden wrote, "The main theme of The Unexpected Universe is Man as the Quest Hero, the wanderer, the voyager, the seeker after adventure, knowledge, power, meaning, and righteousness.

"[21] He quotes from the book: Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war ... Mostly the animals understand their roles, but man, by comparison, seems troubled by a message that, it is often said, he cannot quite remember or has gotten wrong ... Bereft of instinct, he must search continually for meanings ... Man was a reader before he became a writer, a reader of what Coleridge once called the mighty alphabet of the universe.Evolutionary biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky described Dr. Eiseley as ... a Proust miraculously turned into an evolutionary anthropologist ...", and science fiction novelist Ray Bradbury wrote glowing reviews of many of his books including this one.

Eiseley took the occasion of the lunar landing to consider how far humans had to go in understanding their own small corner of the universe, their home planet, much less what he called the 'cosmic prison' of space.

His sizable audience should welcome the latest voyage in search of the secret springs of creativity – evolutionary, cosmic, mental – as a muted adumbration of temporal mortality."

[23]"In All the Strange Hours," states Amazon.com, Eiseley turns his considerable powers of reflection and discovery on his own life to weave a compelling story, related with the modesty, grace, and keen eye for a telling anecdote that distinguish his work.

In a review of the book, author Robert Finch writes, "Like Melville, Eiseley thought of himself, and by extension all mankind, as 'an orphan, a wood child, a changeling,' a cosmic outcast born into a world that afforded him no true home."

He adds that his "distinctive gift as a writer was to take powerfully formative personal influences of family and place and fuse them with his intellectual meditations on universal topics such as evolution, human consciousness and the weight of time.

As Kenneth Heuer writes, "there are countless examples of Eiseley's empathy with life in all its forms, and particularly with its lost outcasts ... the love that transcends the boundaries of species was the highest spiritual expression he knew.

The Lost Notebooks contains numerous examples of his "creative and sympathetic imagination, even when that creation takes place in the solitude of journals never meant for public eyes.

But Wentz considered the inherent contradictions in the statements: "We do not really know what to do with religiousness when it expresses itself outside those enclosures which historians and social scientists have carefully labeled religions.

Man is not as other creatures and ... without the sense of the holy, without compassion, his brain can become a gray stalking horror – the deviser of Belsen.Wentz encompasses such quotes in his partial conclusion: He was indeed a scientist – a bone hunter, he called himself.

However, notes Wentz, "Thoreau had left the seclusion of Walden Pond in order to pace the fields of history, sorting out the artifacts that people had dropped along the way."

The unconscious irony in his observation consists in the fact that this man assumed the progress of science to have been so great that a clear vision of the world without illusion was, by his own time, possible.

It is needless to add that he wrote before Einstein ... at a time when Mendel was just about to be rediscovered, and before the advances in the study of radioactivity ...[36]Wentz noted Eiseley's belief that science may have become misguided in its goals: "Loren Eiseley thought that much of the modern scientific enterprise had removed humanity ever farther from its sense of responsibility to the natural world it had left in order to create an artificial world to satisfy its own insatiable appetites."

[11]Contains The Immense Journey, The Firmament of Time, The Unexpected Universe, The Invisible Pyramid, The Night Country, essays from The Star Thrower, and uncollected prose (2016) Library of America.